Read Online To Wed a Wicked Prince by Jane Feather - Free Book Online

you?”
    “ You sent them?” She stared at him, and then realized that she should have guessed all along. It was just the kind of flamboyant, overwhelming gesture she should have expected from this Russian prince.
    “Yes. Didn’t you find my card?” He took advantage of her momentary disarmament to step past her into the hall.
    “Good morning, Prince Prokov.” Aurelia emerged from a garden of hothouse tulips and regarded him with a cool smile and clear mistrust in her steady gaze. “Am I to understand we have you to thank for this…this largesse.” She made an expansive gesture encompassing the massed blooms behind her.
    “I thought they might brighten your day, ma’am,” he said with a bow, his eyes searching her expression with a little frown in their depths. “Was I mistaken?”
    “We don’t mean to sound ungrateful,” Livia said quickly, “and indeed they are most beautiful…but what are we to do with them all?”
    “Arrange them,” he suggested. “Isn’t that what ladies usually do with flowers?”
    “A bunch at a time perhaps,” Livia said, unable to keep a chuckle from her voice. It really was absurd. “But not an entire botanical garden. Where did you get them all?”
    “I have my sources,” he said. “But if they’re too much of a nuisance I shall have them taken away at once.”
    “Oh, no, you mustn’t do that,” Livia exclaimed. “I don’t mean to be ungracious. It’s…it’s just that such a quantity is rather overwhelming.”
    “Then allow me to help you arrange them.” He tossed his hat onto the Jacobean bench by the door and followed it with his cane and gloves. Then he bent and lifted a woven basket of lilies. “Now, where would you like me to take these?”
    “In the salon, I think, don’t you, Ellie? They have the most wonderful scent.” Livia cast a helpless glance towards her friend.
    Aurelia accepted the fait accompli. “Yes, they’ll look pretty on the console table between the windows,” she agreed, telling herself that flowers were a perfectly respectable offering from a gentleman to a lady. It was only the quantity that was the problem here. Somehow such munificence seemed to detract from the general respectability of the gift.
    Livia, on the other hand, didn’t seem concerned at all, Aurelia noticed. She was laughing and chatting inconsequentially as she directed the prince’s labors, arranging banks of flowers on windowsills and tables, her cheeks delicately flushed and her gray eyes glinting with light like sun on the sea. Aurelia sent a swift prayer for Cornelia’s rapid return to town. She could do with reinforcements together with a second opinion, and the situation cried out for Harry’s investigative contacts.
    The house resembled a hothouse when the flowers were finally dispersed throughout the ground floor, the air heavy with their fragrance.
    “It’s like living in a garden,” Livia said with delight even as Aurelia sneezed. “Oh, dear, do they tickle your nose, Ellie?”
    “A little,” the other woman admitted, blowing her nose on a lace handkerchief. “But I’m sure I’ll get used to it.”
    “Lawks-a-mercy.”
    They all turned to the door at the exclamation. Ada, Morecombe’s wife, stood staring, her gray hair drawn into a severe bun on the nape of her neck, the greenish cast to her pallor more noticeable than usual. She called over her shoulder, “Our Mavis, would you jest come an’ take a look at this lot.”
    Her sister appeared almost immediately with Morecombe at her back. “Well, I never did,” Mavis declared. “I never saw nuthin’ like it, not never.”
    “Eh, an’ jest who’s goin’ t’be waterin’ this lot, that’s what I’ve been wantin’ to know,” Morecombe stated.
    “Aye, take all day it will,” his wife agreed, her sister nodding vigorously. “If ’n you expects yer dinner on time, mum, ye’ll not be lookin’ to our Mavis an’ me to see t’ this lot.”
    “An’ ’tis not my job,